The Secret Commonwealth

core novel 2019 His Dark Materials

Record

First published	2019
Original language	EN
Work type	novel
Canon status	core
Reader rating	4.03 (65,497 ratings, collected 2026-09-13)
Page count	784
First-edition ISBN	9780241373330
First-edition date	2019-10-03
First-edition country	UK

Synopsis

Set about two decades after La Belle Sauvage and some years after the original trilogy, this novel finds Lyra as a twenty-year-old Oxford student who has grown skeptical of her own daemon, Pantalaimon, under the influence of rationalist philosophy that treats daemons as a kind of collective delusion. The strain between Lyra and Pan deepens after a botanist studying a rare rose connected to Dust is murdered, leaving behind a journal whose secrets the Magisterium wants suppressed. As Lyra and Pan investigate the murder and its implications for the study of Dust, their growing estrangement comes to a head, and each is pulled toward a different path -- setting them on separate journeys across a wider, unsettled world while old allies such as Malcolm Polstead, now working against the Magisterium, look for a way to help.

Where it sits

• Universe: His Dark Materials
• Series: The Book of Dust core; position 2 of 3 in the series' recorded order
• Author: Philip Pullman

Notes

• From the series record (The Book of Dust): Completed by The Rose Field, 23 Oct 2025.

Neighbouring works

Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.

• Publication order, within the series The Book of Dust: position 2 of 3: previous La Belle Sauvage (2017) · next The Rose Field (2025)

Sources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Dust
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Dark_Materials
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Commonwealth

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Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.